Recent Articles

The vegetated roof on top of City Hall was already old news when Sustainable Chicago wrote about it for our inaugural issue in the summer of 2008. But we were a new media outlet at the time, focusing on green building efforts in the Chicago market, and there was a lot of ground to make up.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has commitment to shift city-owned buildings to 100% renewable energy by 2025. If implemented, Chicago would be the country’s largest city to decarbonize the energy supply of its public buildings.

The USGBC-Illinois board of directors, reflecting on these achievements, decided it was time for a new epic challenge for the green building community, one that builds on the experience with advancing LEED in Illinois, but will help bring the benefits of sustainability to more buildings and more people who have yet to benefit from the green building revolution.

It’s tempting to assume that a landmarked building like the Rookery has been preserved in architectural amber. But Daniel Burnham and John Root’s world-renowned structure has had a series of upgrades, from Frank Lloyd Wright, William Drummond, and others. The latest changes to the building have been subtler. Like many other historic office buildings in the central business district, the Rookery has been busy for the last several years implementing sustainable strategies that will allow it to stay relevant for the next century.

For the third year in a row, global carbon emissions from the energy sector were flat, according to the International Energy Agency. What’s impressive is that this plateau in emissions comes at a time of economic growth around the world, suggesting that improved energy efficiency, renewable energy production and other factors are driving a decoupling of economic activity and carbon emissions.